The Apple World According to Markkula

An 'Unknown' Co-Founder Leaves After 20 Years of Glory and Turmoil

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: September 1, 1997

WOODSIDE, Calif., Aug. 30—
The steady stream of cyclists who roll by the big steel gate here each weekend may scarcely have time to glance through the bars at the baronial estate inside as they pedal to the hills overlooking Silicon Valley.

But behind that gate is an explanation -- or an interpretation, at least -- of the early glory and recent perils of the valley's most storied company.

For here in this 50-acre domain atop the San Andreas Fault, with its groves of stately redwood trees, lives Armas Clifford (Mike) Markkula Jr., the third and perhaps least understood co-founder of Apple Computer Inc.

More than 20 years after Apple's creation and less than a month after he left the company as vice chairman in a board room overhaul on Aug. 6, Mr. Markkula strolls the grounds and, in a rare interview, offers his version of the company's rise and near-fall.

Mr. Markkula and the Apple board have been widely criticized for having three different chief executives in a four-year span preside over cumulative losses of $1.7 billion.

''I know the board gets criticized for its decisions after the fact, and that's as it should be,'' he said. ''But the good decisions never get written about. There were a lot of good decisions made by Sculley, Spindler and Amelio.''

If Mr. Markkula's executive assessment of the managerial legacies of John Sculley, Michael Spindler and the recently ousted Gilbert F. Amelio do not jibe with the public's perception, it may be because the public perception of Mike Markkula has never quite jibed with his own view of his Apple role.

Mr. Markkula, who is 54, said he did have regrets about the management errors of recent years. But he is also optimistic that, under the temporary direction of another Apple founder, Steven P. Jobs, Apple will re-emerge as a viable company. But whether Apple lives or dies, the company's quixotic nature, and thus its strengths and its weaknesses, has much to do with Mr. Markkula's personality and his passions.

It is Mr. Jobs, a bearded and barefoot visionary toiling in his parents' garage in the late 1970's, who is still the most publicized Apple founder. And it is Mr. Jobs's buddy, Stephen Wozniak, amiable but sometimes enigmatic, who gets credit as the hacker-genius founder.

But invariably, the founding role of Mr. Markkula, 12 years senior to Mr. Jobs, is described as little more than the experienced executive who brought ''adult supervision'' to the fledgling Apple Computer.

True, as a former Intel product- marketing manager who had already made a small fortune on his stock options and retired early, Mr. Markkula was a corporate veteran compared with the younger men. The three were brought together by a pair of seasoned Silicon Valley executives, Regis McKenna and Don Valentine, who correctly guessed that Mr. Markkula might be willing to invest some money and management time in the Jobs-Wozniak effort to build and market a new kind of personal computer.

But less well known is that Mr. Markkula, besides playing president and camp counselor, is also himself a hands-on hacker.

It was Mr. Markkula, for example, who instructed Mr. Wozniak to design the floppy disk drive for the Apple II, after discovering that a checkbook balancing program he himself had written took far too long to load into the machine from the computer's original tape drive. The floppy disk, a new approach, helped Apple differentiate its early computer from competitors' machines.

And it was Mr. Markkula who wrote several of the early software programs for the Apple II -- and freely distributed them -- under the pen name Johnny Appleseed.

And later, this engineer with a hobbyist's passion for personal computing became Apple's best product tester, often finding dozens of flaws in hardware or software that was supposedly ready to ship, according to early Apple employees.

The point is that rather than being the executive's executive, as he has so often been described, Mr. Markkula was really more the engineer's engineer. And that may help explain some of the management turmoil over the years at Apple, for which Mr. Markkula has shouldered much of the blame.

For despite serving at various times as chairman, president, board member and vice chairman in his two decades at the company, Mr. Markkula may have been less suited to the formal management-expert role into which he was originally cast than to the informal hacker-entrepreneurial roles that were his earliest, and perhaps best, contributions to Apple Computer.

Some recent news reports have suggested that Mr. Markkula was driven from Apple by Mr. Jobs as an act of revenge, retribution for the bitter dispute that had led Mr. Jobs himself to quit Apple in 1985. But as Mr. Markkula tells it, after being the perceived power behind the throne at Apple for so long, he himself had already decided it was time to move on -- and to leave to others the struggle to revive Apple.

''I was ready to leave two years earlier,'' said Mr. Markkula, as he paused near the site of the new 7,000-square-foot home he is building on his estate. But because of Apple's financial difficulties, Mr. Markkula said he continued to delay his departure, eventually deciding that January 1997, his 20th anniversary with the company, would be a fitting time to step down.